Four hours’ sleep a night. Seven-day workweeks. Diet
Cokes around the clock. For her first few years out of college,
this was Evelyn Stevens’ life.

After graduating from Dartmouth in 2005, Stevens worked as an
analyst for Lehman Brothers before taking a job as an associate
at investment fund Gleacher Mezzanine (known today as Arrowhead).
Both jobs paid well, but the work was intense and left little
time for much else.

Then one day in late 2007, while on vacation in San Francisco,
Stevens’ sister talked her into doing a local cyclocross race,
which at first seemed like a crazy idea. She’d played tennis in
college, went to the gym, and did some running, but she rarely
pedaled a bike, let alone raced one. And yet there, in Golden
Gate Park, at age 25, she raced for the first time.

Somewhat anticlimactically, she crashed and got banged up, but
she finished and was immediately hooked — "in love" even.

“I was like, ‘This is awesome — this is for me,’” she says about
that first race.

Seven years on, far from Wall Street, Stevens ranks among
the world’s best cyclists. At 31, she’s in the prime of her
career. With major victories already crowding her palmarès, or
race résumé, she’s now targeting the sport’s most coveted prizes:
next year's world
championships and Olympic gold, which could be hers in 2016.

Stevens recently
sat down with Business Insider to talk about her remarkable, if
improbable, career trajectory. We met her at a training camp in
Richmond, Virginia, which in September 2015 will host the world
championships.

Stevens
came to pro cycling a decade later than many of her competitors,
but talent and determination have made her a star of the
sport.Ethan
Glading

Usually held in Europe, worlds
are coming to the US for only the second time ever (the first
world championships in the US were held in Colorado Springs in
1986). It’s an extraordinary opportunity for American cycling,
and probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Stevens.

“To have worlds in the US — wow,” she says. “I
feel lucky just having it in my career. Next year is the year
going into the Olympics, so the world championships are always a
really big goal in that year. I’ve never met a woman racer who
doesn’t want to win worlds. We don’t have the
three-week Tour de
France [as the men have]. We have World Cup races and we
have the Giro,
which there’s not a ton of coverage of. And to be racing here
with your stars-and-stripes on, in your home country, it’s
fantastic.”

It all started after that first race in California. Stevens
bought a bike of her own, but back in New York City she met an
“intimidating entry point” — Manhattan traffic. So she’d walk her
bike from her apartment over to the West Side Highway, then pedal
up the path.

“I had no idea what I was doing at first,” she says. “I thought
everyone in Central Park was a pro. I was in T-shirts and never
looking the part.”

She signed up for a cycling clinic, where she honed her
bike-handling skills and learned how to ride in a pack. In one of
her first big amateur races, she didn’t just win but broke away
solo and caught the pro field that was up the road. “That was
pretty cool,” she says, “even though at the time it was like,
‘This is awkward — I don’t know how to pass them.’”

While still working long hours, she fantasized about going pro,
but she was hesitant. In several races, she had shown real
talent, but she would be coming very late to the professional
ranks. Most pros start racing as kids or teens. One well-known
rider, Ina-Yoko
Teutenberg, whom Stevens would later be teammates with,
started competing when she was 6.

In October, Stevens joined
nearly two-dozen of the top US cyclists for a training camp in
Richmond, host of the 2015 world championships.Nick
Davis Photography

Stevens risked
it anyway, and quit her job in July 2009. She won more than a
half-dozen of the toughest races in the US, in addition to taking
silver at the national time-trial championships. That September
she went to the world championships in Switzerland, finishing
15th in the road race — a staggeringly impressive performance for
someone brand new to the sport. She has now competed in six world
championships in a row.

She still smiles when she thinks about that first trip. “I went
to worlds with a bike that I’d paid for with my own money, a
helmet I bought, sunglasses I bought, and shoes I bought,” she
says, laughing. “At the time that didn’t seem weird, but I got
15th and my first professional contract started in 2010.”

As for pay, salaries for female cyclists vary widely, and are
much lower than men's. The top riders earn over $100,000, but
there are many who earn far less than that. There are bonuses,
prize money, and endorsements. USA Cycling
offered large bonuses to medal winners at the London
Olympics, where American Kristin Armstrong won gold. Still,
women’s cycling is far behind men’s when it comes to
both pay
and media coverage. According to Ernst & Young, as
reported by the
Guardian, the minimum wage for male UCI WorldTour cyclists —
the sport’s highest level — is €35,000 [$43,000] a
year, with the average salary reported at €265,000
[$325,000] in 2012. “Female elite cyclists reportedly earn just
€20,000 [$24,500] per annum – and those are the lucky ones,”
the Guardian wrote in November.

Since 2010, Stevens has
since won some of the sport's most prestigious races — and she
has twice won the US time-trial title. Perhaps her most
impressive victory was in the grueling one-day classic Flèche
Wallonne Féminine, in Belgium, where she went to the line with,
and decisively beat, world champion Marianne Vos, whom many
consider to be the greatest bike racer in the history of the
sport, male or female.

Stevens' first coach, a former pro named Matthew Koschara, has
not been surprised by her success. He calls her a “one in 10
million” talent.

“She has the right appetite, physiologically and
psychologically,” Koschara told Business Insider. “She’s old
school, she’s hard core — she’s a fighter.” He points to Stevens’
remarkable power-to-weight ratio, and although he won’t reveal
stats from the time he coached Stevens, he says her three- and
10-minute power numbers, measured in watts, were “huge.” At
five-foot-six and 120 pounds, she’s compact and very powerful.

“Evie is a very unusually naturally gifted person,” he adds. “She
came so late to cycling, but I’d say she’s among the top three or
four cyclists in the world.” Whereas she could win on 20% of
courses a few years ago, she can now win on 80% of them,
according to Koschara. A natural climber, she’s worked hard to
become a more complete, all-around cyclist who can win on the
flats and cobbles and in crosswinds.

“She’s made up any deficit she may have had coming late to the
sport,” he says. “I’d be surprised if she didn’t medal in
Richmond and Rio.”

Stevens says she approaches cycling as she did investment
banking: with tenacity. After turning pro, she dedicated herself
completely — she was "hyper-focused" — just as when she’d started
her business career.

“With investment banking and finance, it’s not a world you
gradually go into it,” she says. “It’s not like I started and
they told me, ‘Take your time, get comfortable, leave at 5 p.m.’
You’re on deals, you’re operating on a high level quickly.

"If you want to get to that high level, you have to go after it,”
she adds. “Investment banking is like pro cycling: It’s not a
career you have for 30 years. You realize, ‘I’m going for it.'
For my career in cycling, every day it’s like, ‘What do I need to
do better? What do I need to train?’ You can’t become
complacent."

One big difference in Stevens’ life these days is how much more
sleep she gets — eight hours, plus naps, about double what she
used to get. “You have to sleep in and you have to eat healthy,
and, no, you can’t drink seven Diet Cokes to keep you awake,” she
says. “If you’re tired you have to rest.” For Stevens, businesses
would operate at a much higher efficiency level if employees
slept more: “I think about how many errors I probably made while
being sleep-deprived. If I ever ran a company I’d have sleep
pods.” (She's still thinking about one day getting an
MBA.)

Stevens realizes that
Richmond 2015 will probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
for her to win a world title on US soil.Ethan
Glading

From the outside, if you meet Stevens in person, say, over coffee
in downtown Richmond on a sunny fall day, it’s easy to think
she’s intelligent and extremely determined. Her opponents on the
road may also point out she's fearless and hungry. They might
talk about the time she threw down with the world champ on one of
the toughest uphill finishes in bike racing, and won.

If Stevens continues her climb to the very top of world cycling,
there will be more such stories to tell.

“Cycling is a very finite sport, kind of like the world of
finance, but magnified," she says. "There’s highs, there’s lows,
and you see it so instantaneously — the crashes, the wins."

“I’ve had some big wins, but I’m not at the top level yet. So
it’s like, ‘What do I need to do to become top level?’ I think
it’s the same in finance. For those moving up that ladder,
they’re constantly looking and thinking, ‘How do you do it
differently? How do you do it better?’ It’s a constantly moving
process.”